CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.
LIFE UNDER CAPITALISM
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The FBI was thus born primarily as a national security agency, charged with the domestic front. Over the ensuing decades, the agency accumulated a voluminous record of underhanded and controversial interventions, many clearly unconstitutional. It was precisely to deflect public attention from this unpopular political police role that the establishment began to provide the masses with a different image of the FBI, one concerned with leading “public enemies”, notorious gangsters and racqueteers. The “crime busters” image was reinforced by carefully managed p.r. campaigns and compliant media programs, such as the eponymous TV series The FBI, which made the agency a welcome fixture of Americana in most US households.
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Free Speech-Hating Liberals Attack Elon Musk
3 minutes readProminent liberals like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich were up in arms about the prospect that mega-billionaire Elon Musk might purchase controlling interest in Twitter and change the social media site’s policies about banning content deemed “misleading” or “inflammatory.” The idea that actual free speech might be brought back to Twitter is apparently unthinkable for Reich and his ilk. Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the threat of free speech to authoritarians on the left.
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Disturbing news: at least 50% of Americans now endorse censorship—by the government or Big Tech
17 minutes readP. GREANVILLE—Inhabiting a clusterfuck of ignorance and disinformation, Americans are woefully ill-equipped to distinguish truth from falsehood. Granted, the desire to expunge the lies from the national debate is valid and healthy, but that train left the station a long time ago. It left the station when Americans —mostly in the immediate postwar period—the “Eisenhower years”—dropped their guard to concentrate on living the American Dream, brushing aside the need to understand real politics. They did not see that the postwar affluence was the product not so much of capitalism’s wonderful design—long enshrined by hucksters as “the American Way of Life”—but of a historically brief and exceptional moment in which the United States had found itself as the sole global industrial superpower, with all rivals in ruins.
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DMITRY ORLOV—This sort of downward spiral does not automatically spell “Apocalypse,” but the specifics of the state cult of the US—an old-time religiosity overlaid with the secular religion of progress—are such that there can be no other options: either we are on our way up to build colonies on Mars, or we perish in a ball of flame. Since the humiliation of having to ask the Russians for permission to fly the Soyuz to the International Space Station makes the prospect of American space colonies seem dubious, it’s Plan B: balls of flame here we come!